Terror and violent resistance constitute massive challenges for the defense of the state of Israel. Eyal Weizman, director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College in London has for some time been looking at the connections between territorial security, architecture and modern warfare. In the following excerpt from his current research project, he examines a very specific tactic used in the course of the so-called »humanitarian wars«

Limitations on its ability to maintain a permanent ground presence in Gaza and the West Bank have reinforced Israel’s reliance on a tactical logic that seeks to disrupt Palestinian armed and political resistance through targeted assassination—extra-juridical state executions—undertaken from both air and ground.¹ In fact, the precondition for Israel’s policy of partial evacuations is that, as the »Alternative Team« – an Israeli security think tank – recently conceded, Israel’s security services maintain domination of the evacuated area by other means than territorial control. »Whether we are physically present in the territories or not, we should still be able to demonstrate our ability to control and affect it…«² These »thanatotactics« – death tactics –, the term which I would like to use to refer to these assassinations, can no longer be explained simply according to the logic of terrorist prevention; they must also be seen as the state’s attempt to maintain a degree of security and political influence in Palestinian areas.

The simple operational assumption underlying thanatotactics is that the principal assets of the Palestinian organizations are people - political and spiritual leaders, spokespersons, experienced fighters, bomb-makers, suicide volunteers, commanders, activists and recruiters - and that if these people, who sustain the organizational logic of Palestinian resistance, are killed, their »system« will be disrupted and become more vulnerable to further actions. Without the agents mentioned above, the Israeli security establishment believes, the Palestinians will become docile subjects to Israeli control. Beyond its capacity to disrupt terror operations, »killing,« according to Shimon Naveh, former director of the Operational Theory Research Institute, a military think-tank which develops the »theoretical”«foundations for such attacks, »injects energy into the enemy system, disrupting its institutional hierarchies…« and, what is more, »›operational shock‹ is best achieved when the rhythms of these operations is rapid and the enemy system is not given time to recover between attacks.« Although there can be no prediction of the outcome, the effect of these operations, according to Naveh, is a degree of institutional chaos that allows Israeli security forces to wait and see »how the cards fall.«³ According to Ephraim Segoli, former helicopter pilot and former commander of the Air Force base in Palmahim from which most helicopter assassination raids have been launched, »liquidations are the central component of IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] operation and the very essence of the war it is waging.« He mentioned furthermore, »the desire to ›perfect‹ these operations meant that Israel’s security industries have reorganized and started concentrating on the development of systems that primarily serve this operational logic.«⁴ Assassinations conducted by »Arabized« or uniformed soldiers, by helicopters, jets or unmanned drones, are now taking place almost every day and night in the West Bank and Gaza.

When targeted assassinations are explained to the public through the media, the military tends to justify them retrospectively, according to a vindictive logic that insists that the victims had »blood on their hands.« But this is obviously not a legal argument. When challenged legally in the High Court of Justice, these operations are explained according to a preventive logic that describes targeted individuals as an imminent danger—»ticking bombs« about to explode in an impending terror attack. The head of the IDF legal branch, Colonel Daniel Reisner, already stated during the early weeks of the Al Aqsa Intifada that, due to the heightened level and frequency of Palestinian violence, Israel could legally start defining the events as an »armed conflict short of war.«⁵ This definition implied that, for the purpose of their killing (but not for the purpose of their internment), Palestinian militants could be seen as combatants (rather than »criminals«) and could thus be attacked at any place and time, not only when they were in the process of undertaking a hostile action. According to the Israeli government position, defining the Intifada as an »armed conflict short of war« renders lawful the killings of every member of an armed organization, and even of the leadership of political organizations that include a military wing that engages in violence (this category effectively includes all Palestinian organizations)⁶. Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense at the time the policy was announced, reinforces this logic of extended application: »the fact of having a position within the Palestinian Authority confers no immunity on anyone.«⁷ Former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz warned at the beginning of 2006 that »no one will be immune,« including Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.⁸

Given that, under international law, designations of inside/outside define the intensity of preventive measures allowed (criminal/inside, military/outside) and that the definition of »inside« depends upon a test of »effective control of a state over the territory in question,«⁹ the unilateral evacuation of the Gaza strip strengthened Israel’s legal case for targeted assassinations and has further accelerated its use. Politically, Israel expected that after it had demonstrated its resolve, evacuated settlements and retreated to the international, 1967 border around Gaza, the world would be more tolerant to these forms of military actions.

Urban Killing
The movement of Israeli manhunt squads through the Palestinian urban terrain often resembles the movement of security forces—through ceilings and walls—in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 classic film, »Brazil.« In a previous article, »Walking through Walls,« I explained how Israeli soldiers move within Palestinian cities from house to house through holes they blast in party walls and progress across hundred-meter-long »overground-tunnels« carved out through dense and contiguous built fabrics.¹⁰ Within Palestinian towns and refugee camps, Israeli soldiers do not use the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, or the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather move horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. Rather than submit to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries, movement becomes constitutive of space. This »un-walling of the wall,« to borrow a term from Gordon Matta-Clark, ignores the limitation of the built fabric and allows for a three-dimensional movement through walls, ceilings and floors across the urban balk in search of its suspects.

To complement military tactics that involve physically breaking and walking through walls, new methods have been devised to allow soldiers to see and kill through walls. The Israeli company Camero has developed a hand-held imaging device that combines thermal imaging with ultra-wideband radar, which, like contemporary maternity-ward ultra-sound systems, has the ability to produce three-dimensional renderings of biological life concealed behind barriers.¹¹ Human bodies appear on the screen as fuzzy heat sources floating (like fetuses) within an abstract clear medium wherein everything solid—walls, furniture, objects—has melted away.¹² Weapons using the standard NATO 5.56 mm rounds are complemented with some using the 7.62 mm rounds, which are capable of penetrating brick, wood and adobe without much deflection of the bullet-head. Instruments of »literal transparencies« are the main components that help produce a ghost-like (or computer-game-like) military fantasy world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes fully navigable as if it offered no barriers to movement, vision and fire.

Shimon Naveh put it to me in these terms: »military units think like criminals... like serial killers… [they] are allocated an area and learn it for months, they study the persons within the enemy organization they are asked to kill, their appearance, their voice [as heard in telephone tapping], their habits…like professional killers. When they enter the area they know where to look for these people and start killing them.«¹³

Technology versus Occupation
The military now believes that every floor in every house, every car, every telephone call or radio transmission, even the smallest event that occurs in the terrain could be monitored, policed and destroyed from the air. The imagined geographies of vertical power have thus completed a ninety-degree shift, placing »the orient« – the object of study and the target of aggression – no longer in the east, across the horizon and the sea, but vertically under the tyranny of a western airborne civilization manning, or remotely managing, armed platforms above it.

The airborne operations of targeted assassinations rely on technical and doctrinal possibilities that originated in Israel’s Lebanon Wars of the 1980s and 1990s and have further developed and been »perfected« throughout the second Intifadah.¹⁴ The sacking of former Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon by Sharon and his replacement by former Air Force commander Dan Halutz, only months before the ground evacuation of Gaza was undertaken in the summer of 2005, testified to the perceived offset of the strategic domain from the ground to the air, and to the acceptance, at the government level, of Halutz’s agenda/mantra: »technology instead of occupation.«¹⁵ The technology Halutz referred to was the one at the basis of »targeted assassinations,« which he consistently and arrogantly defended even when it regularly took the lives of many bystanders.

From the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000, to the time these lines are being written in July 2006, 256 Palestinians have been killed from the air. One hundred and fifty one of them were the intended targets for assassination. Of the civilians killed unintentionally, 45 were children.¹⁶

Ephraim Segoli explained the logic of »targeted assassinations« as »a success story based upon a high degree of cooperation between the General Security Service and the Air Force.«¹⁷ The GSS provides the death lists, intelligence and incrimination (the final identification), and the Air Force does the killing. The assassination operations start when the GSS submits to a special ministerial committee for their approval the dossier of a person containing a recommendation for »liquidation.« Each assassination must be, however, approved and signed off by both the Minister of Defense and the Prime Minister.¹⁸

Killing individuals is not only a component in but has become the very essence of the current campaign against Palestinian resistance. In recent years, Gaza has become the world’s largest laboratory for airborne »thanatotactics.« Although the US administration publicly protests Israeli assassinations and demands that it put a stop to them, different branches of the US security forces, themselves engaged in unacknowledged assassinations using unmanned drones, secretly »examines,« as Ephraim Segoli mentioned to me, »Israeli Air Force results and performance in order to draw lessons for its own wars.«¹⁹ Many of the gadgets and doctrines that compose the paradigm of Revolution in Military Affairs [RMA] and network-centricity of current US strategy in Iraq have been co-produced with different Israeli security services and its industries, or were based on Israeli practical experience. In this respect, Donald Rumsfeld’s over-confidence in imagining he could manage to deal with resistance in Iraq was largely based on his thinking that Israeli techniques for dealing with Palestinian resistance could be simply scaled up.

How Is It Done?
A swarm of different types of drones, each of its individual components circulating at a different latitude, and up to the height of 30,000 feet, is navigated by a GPS system and woven by radio communication into a single synergetic reconnaissance and killing instrument that conducts the entire spectrum of the assassination operation. With the development and proliferation of drone technology, there remain, as Naveh conceded, »very few Israeli soldiers in the airspace over Gaza… the air is mainly filled with golems… an army without soldiers.«²⁰

Targeted attacks are still responsible for hundreds of »unintended« civilian deaths, and with each of these deaths, a new military stunned apology: »We did not see the civilians,« or »they came into the scene at the last moment.«²¹ As always, behind the technological sophistication, methodological complexity and technophiliac hoo-ha, there is the usual military chaos, arrogance and incompetence.

The IDF prefers to employ the sanitizing term »focused obstruction« or »focused preemption« to describe these assassinations, and most of the popular Israeli media partakes in this rhetoric, concealing, when possible, the ground portrayal of the assassinations, and does not display the corpses, blood and body parts—the very images it focuses on when it reviews the consequences of a Palestinian terror attack. Clips from the »kamikaze« camera on »smart missiles« and from other sensor are broadcast in the popular media to demonstrate IDF refutation of Palestinian claims of indiscriminate killings, and to restore political resolve to further apply these tactics. The images and videos from these munitions are thus as much a media product as they are »operation footage,«²² and we should not be surprised if their function to produce »broadcast-able« images is actually reflected in their technological development. In fact. their most distinct early effect was not so much as munitions as as media products. During the Gulf War of 1991, the media audience was fed images of kamikase bomb as demonstration of the technological superiority and surgical skills of the US military, although most munitions delivered were, and most of the gruesome realities of the war were still caused by, the »invisible« old »dumb« iron type. Through the inclusion of some images/information and exclusion of others, the Israeli popular media projects executions not only as necessary, but also as ethical, rhetorically legalizing them by what Neve Gordon called »the discursive production of a pseudo-judicial process.«²³

The »Humanitarian« War
In mid-2006, after many civilians had been killed during airborne assassinations, the chief of the Israeli Air Force, Eliezer Shakedy, apologized and claimed that under his command the ratio between civilians and combatants killed in targeted assassination was reduced from one to one to now include merely twenty percent of »uninvolved civilians.«²⁴ A critical perspective must contend thus with military claims that developments in the technology and techniques of targeted assassination, if allowed to continue unchallenged and incorporate new innovations, may bring about fewer unintended deaths, without having this fact exonerate the act.

Lacking another mode of critique, to justify or oppose military actions one would have to accept a »necro-economy« in which »lesser evil« or »lesser evils,« represented here in a lower body count, is measured against an imaginary or real »greater evil« and more death.
In this context »evil« is best understood according to Israeli Philosopher Adi Ophir as a category displaced from the realm of the divine or diabolical, and is located rather in a social order in which sufferings and pain could have been, but weren’t, prevented.²⁵ How should evil be minimized, if not prevented? A critical method was suggested by the human rights scholar, Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff claimed that in a »war on terror,« democratic societies might need to breach some basic human rights and allow their security services to engage in other covert and unsavory state actions – a »lesser evil« in his eyes – in order to fend off or minimize potential »greater evils.«²⁶ Ignatieff is even willing to consider targeted assassinations, and in particular the Israeli ones, under certain conditions, as »qualifying within the effective moral-political framework of the lesser evil«²⁷ According to the balance of evils he proposes, assassination could be undertaken only if, firstly, a more moderate use of force cannot be applied; and secondly, if assassinations themselves could help avoid more devastating consequences, such as a terror attack.

However, the difficulty with decisions based upon an economy of evils, and thus with Ignatieff’s approach, may lie somewhere else.

Firstly: who is the party to judge what the proper relation between different »evils« should be? Judgments on what may constitute a »lesser evil« (judgments that will become, no doubt, more binding than national or international law, and on occasion, no doubt again, a pretext for their »temporary« suspension) would be undertaken either by the security forces—who could themselves, even according to Ignatieff, not be trusted to make this judgment because it is they that may benefit from a greater leeway of action—or by the democratic institutions of society (moderated by process of »adversarial scrutiny«) that will have to take a decision most often in situations of collective pain, when the ability to take moderate and considered decisions has continuously been proven to be at best limited.

Secondly: acts defined and carried out as »lesser evils« may become more readily applied. A less-brutal measure is a measure that may be accepted and tolerated.²⁸ In the violent policing that militaries call »low intensity conflict,« the sides seek to keep the level of violence as close as possible to the threshold level of the »tolerable,« a level that is itself dynamic, because the status quo of low intensity conflict helps preserve the political hegemony in both sides. Low intensity conflicts function thus as a sequence of actions and counter-actions whose routine define ever anew the level of that which could be tolerated.²⁹

In the economy of this conflict, hit-and-run raids and aerial attacks are understood by the military as a »lesser evil,« the more moderate alternative to the devastating capacity that the military actually possesses and would unleash, no doubt, in the form of a full-scale invasion, the renewal of ground occupation or in indiscriminate civilian killings, if the enemy exceeded the »acceptable« level of violence or breached some unspoken agreement in the violent discourse of acts and counter-acts.³⁰ The promoters of the instruments, techniques and language of »lesser evil« believe that by developing and perfecting them they actually exercise a restraining impact on the government and on the rest of the security forces, which would otherwise succeed in pushing for the radicalization of violence. Confirming this logic, Air Force chief Shakedy mentioned, before what he described actually did take place only few weeks later, that »the only alternative to aerial attacks [read targeted assassinations] is a ground operation and the reoccupation of Gaza… there is no more precise a weapon we have.«³¹

The attack on Gaza starting the end of June 2006, and the attack on Lebanon undertaken in July-August 2006, both following the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, demonstrated that the alternative, more destructive means is still and always present, especially when the »unwritten rules« of the low intensity conflict are perceived to have been broken. The aggressive attack and killing of civilians, the displacement of communities, the intentional destruction of property and infrastructure that included airports, power stations and bridges in both places, the making of almost a million refugees in Lebanon, the destruction of ministry buildings, the arrest of government and parliament members and the expulsion of Jerusalem residents in Palestine,³² should be understood, much like the April 2002 »Operation Defensive Shield,« especially the attack on Jenin, as eruptions of violence meant to sustain the threat for the real possibility of ever-present alternative »greater measures.«

However, and without endorsing »greater evils,« it is the lower intensity alternatives that may paradoxically result in higher numbers of casualties. This is simply because, following the logic that makes »lesser evil«” more readily tolerated and more easily applied, the overall duration of conflict could be extended and more of these »lesser evils« could be committed, without the diplomatic shuttling and international »peace forces« being hurried in. The result of an extended application of »lesser evils,« even according to the necro-economical logic that originally promoted it, might accumulate to become the »greater evil« and the increase in deaths that their application was intended to avoid. This is demonstrated as well by the IDF’s indiscriminate use of rubber-coated steel ammunition. Soldiers believe that these »non-lethal munitions« demonstrate »restraint« in non-life -threatening situations. But the frequent and indiscriminate use of these so called »rubber bullets« causes the death and maiming of many Palestinian demonstrators, mainly children.³³ The lower the threshold of violence a certain means is believed to possess, the more frequent its application will become.

I do not intend to suggest, though, that the issue of low intensity means needs to be addressed according to an economy of violence at all, but to indicate that even if it does, its results may often prove to be the opposite to those intended, refuting the very economical logic that grounded its conception.

The quest to make war more »humane«— also embodied since the nineteenth century in various conventions on the laws of war— may, under certain conditions, paradoxically result in making it more possible, more imaginable, more frequent, longer and thus more corrupting. Regulating violence, the laws of war and other moral rules that societies may voluntarily impose on themselves, may end up legitimizing it.

The »Gap« between Individual and Collective
The urgent and important criticism that peace organizations often level at the IDF - that it is de-humanizing its enemies - masks another more dangerous process by which the military incorporates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks to cooperate directly with, the very humanitarian and human rights organizations that oppose it. The other side of the policy of killing individuals is, and increasingly so, becoming obsessed with the general living conditions of those people not killed. In March 2006, Chief of Staff Halutz received some members of Machsom [checkpoint] Watch—an organization dedicated to ensuring that Palestinians are not abused at military check-points—at a mediatized meeting where he claimed to be ready to hear their suggestions on improving IDF conduct at its checkpoints and addressing the problems of the Palestinian population under occupation in general.

Similarly, as far as the Israeli government understands them, targeted operations were designed to avoid the necessity to »punish an entire population« and pick out only those »guilty.« The logic that sees the radicalization of targeted assassination as the condition for attempts at improving the life of the general population is embodied in a clichéd statement often reiterated by Ariel Sharon, and recently repeated by the new Israeli Minister of Defense, Amir Peretz, who claimed, after IDF soldiers killed seven Palestinians in Jenin in May 2006, that the new IDF strategy under his command will be to »fight terror hard while making easy the life of the innocent civilian population.« Indeed, this recent policy, in which targeted killing is undertaken to let the general population live (or at least so it is argued) was embodied by the opening, immediately after this killing (and only temporarily), of a long closed terminal in Gaza to agricultural and medical supplies for »humanitarian reasons.«
The logic of Israeli sovereignty and control over the Palestinian population has been transformed from one based on ground occupation, physical presence and management of daily lives, to one based on targeted assassination on the one hand and on »crisis modulation« operated by the opening and closing of border crossings on the other. »Thanatotactics« have thus found an unpredictable partner in the humanitarian politics that seek to manage life. This places a particular cynical type of »state-humanitarianism« and the tactics of targeted assassinations at the two poles of a single policy, one that has finally managed to find a way to bridge the gap between the individual to be removed and the collective to be healed.

This article is based on excerpts from a chapter of the same title in Eyal Weizmann’s forthcoming book »Hollow Land« that will come out in spring 2007 with Verso press, London/New York.

 

 

---